134 Y B Y T H E B O O K E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I My hope is that neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene’s new book on how we read will be read widely. The main reason has to do with the way he writes, in a style free of self-congratulation, with gems to be found on random pages. Dehaene quotes from Alberto Man- guel’s History of Reading in an early chapter: ‘‘Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.’’ To which, one might append, science writing can be too ungenerous at times – a scientist, intending to be accessible and lucid, confirms only that science is distant, luster absent; the words are opaque. Readerly largesse isn’t possible, and the author has a problem that modern science can’t fix: he just can’t write well. Not so with Dehaene. Once a mathematician, later a psycholo- gist, he has read all kinds of books and has ‘‘listened to the dead with his eyes’’ (as Francisco de Quevedo defined reading, quoted on page 1); now Dehaene studies what he calls ‘‘reading in the brain’’ at the Collège de France. His subject is of particular interest for Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, by Stanislas Dehaene (Viking, 388 pp., $27.95)